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Adding some sandalwood paste to her ownbody'ssubstance, she breathed life into it and created a guardian. Nevertheless, Lord Shiva managed, with the help of Vishnu some say, to decapitate and render the boy lifeless.

Mahadeva gave in to his wife's grief, however, and agreed to replace the creature's head with that of whichever creature appeared from the northerly, most auspicious, direction.

So it was that the guardian acquired the head of an elephant and was adopted by Shiva and Parvati as their son.

The phrase means something grand that is useless, costly to maintain and hard to dispose of of at any price. There is/was such a building in the shape of an elephant at the amusement park of Coney Island, New York.

However, the origin must lie in the fact that an albino elephant would have been the prize in any sultan's zoological collection.

It would have required special and costly maintenance necessitated by its sensitiveskin and eyes, but also since it would need its own full-time vigilant guard as an object of envy - a rare and amazing animal to behold.

Pachyderms [tough-skinned ones] consist of two sub-species, the African and the Asian. The African elephant is the taller and slimmer of the two, with larger ears and two 'fingers' on its trunk. There is also a pigmy form of this elephant.

The animal of Hindu and Buddhist mythology is the smaller eared variety. It has a long history of service to human beings. Besides serving as a mount for royalty, and historically, as a war 'machine', it was and still is used in the lumber industry of southeastAsia since it can go where large machines cannot.

Worse, with the brisk elephant trade, the elephants' owners and mahouts change often.

So the elephant doesn't develop bonds of trust with its mahout as it did when the same mahout looked after the elephant for much of its life."

"Elephants are unpredictable and can be very dangerous," she adds, but that is not surprising.

Though it is well-known that to reward a correct behaviour is a much more effective technique in training than to punish an incorrect move, the method used on elephants is still primitive.

Mahouts get the elephant to obey some commands with an eye-watering blow of the metal hook to the animal's skull. It is no wonder that some elephants have been known to nurse a life-long hatred for their merciless trainers.

However, the number of stories told of revenge by goring to death or trampling is balanced by accounts of animals who have saved their mahout's life.

Interestingly, a Frenchman named Henri Mahout discovered, in 1860, Angkor Wat, the medievaltemple complex abandoned around 1450 that now lies deep in the jungle of Cambodia.

"Mad-elephant-itis" or masth [pron. must] is associated with excretions from the pachyderm's facial gland ducts. The God-intoxication of the princely fool of Sufipoetry is referred to as "masth kallandar," as in the famous song by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.